Boxing News - Latest Headlines

Mayweather-Guerrero PPV numbers look bad, says Rafael

By Allan Fox: Last Saturday night’s pay per view bout between Floyd Mayweather Jr. (44-0, 26 KO’s) and Robert “The Ghost” Guerrero (31-2-1, 18 KO’s) on Showtime at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, Nevada, are said to have been really bad, according to Dan Rafael of ESPN.

He’s reporting that the PPV numbers are under 1 million buys. This means that Showtime lost a lot of money on this PPV card, says Rafael. The card needed to bring in between 1.1 to 1.2 million buys to break even.

It won’t be surprising if this does turn out to be the case because Mayweather made a big mistake of choosing to defend his WBC welterweight title against the little known Guerrero instead of just vacating the title and looking to take on the most popular fighter that he could find to pump up his PPV totals.

Mayweather could have helped himself in a big way if he had agreed to fight WBC junior middleweight champion Saul “Canelo” Alvarez in September because then Canelo would have stayed on his undercard, and that would have likely resulted in another 300 thousand or more PPV buys. Not having Canelo on the undercard really hurt Mayweather.

Having the WBC title is like a heavy anchor for Mayweather because he’s forced to fight his non-popular mandatory challengers like Guerrero, and no one outside of the hardcore boxing fans know who these guys are.

Asking boxing fans to pay between $60 to $70 to watch Mayweather dominate a 7-1 underdog like Guerrero is like PPV repellent, and it’s too bad Mayweather and Showtime didn’t get a clue a long time ago this wasn’t a PPV worthy fight.

Mayweather is going to have to be a little more careful in his selection of opponents from here on out if he wants to get his PPV numbers back up. If having the WBC strap is going to force him to fight more guys like Guerrero, then he’s going to need to dump the strap because it’ll force him to finish his career with some truly awful fights.

Look at who Mayweather’s new #1 challenger – Luis Carlos Abregu. If Mayweather ends up fighting Abregu, I predict the fight won’t even draw 600,000 PPV buys. If the WBC is going to force Mayweather to fight these guys then he needs to vacate.